Mick Wall - Weapons Grade Y-fronts Tour

Thank you. Now if you've acted wisely and done what I just told you, you should now be reading this on the bus home, surrounded by other ugly, drunken people all on their way home from whatever even bigger disaster of an evening they've had elsewhere, surrounded by the vomit and broken glass that constitute a good night out in most of the godforsaken places this tour will be visiting.

By now you'll have had a gander at the pictures; grown bored reading the credits; wondered aloud what insane, masochistic urge prompted you to hand over the necessary readies to procure this top class tour programme that in no way resembles a cheap rip-off hastily thrown together at the last minute by a semi-trained team of smoking dogs and tea-drinking chimpanzees. And now you've come to the good bit. An in-depth interview with the stars of the show.

In this case, and in no particular order (except to say that Eddie vowed to relocate my head a great deal closer to my arse if I didn't mention him first) that dedicated student of the human condition, Edward Elizabeth Hitler, and his snake-hipped cohort, spiritual mentor and, as Eddie affectionately refers to him sometimes in public, “total wanker,” Richard Richard. Or Richie to his mates. If he had any mates. Which he doesn't, of course, except for Eddie. Lucky fellow.

As you know, they have spent most of their lives together; sharing the same grim flat, the same grim thoughts, the same grim saveloy-and-chips farts and mad alcoholic fall-outs that always end in a quite spectacularly grim sort of way. And yet still they remain together, as close now as the day they were both booted out of college for drilling holes in the walls of the cubicles in the women's toilets, only to discover they had made a mistake and ended up on their knees peeping through a hole into the university chapel, a place so devoid of human contact it was like staring into the terrifying abyss. It was three days before either of them noticed, however, which partly explains why Richie has never had a girlfriend, and why Eddie has never even wanted one. To this day they both still associate “girls' doings” with a cold wind blowing noisily up an empty, candlelit passage, only the stained-glass portholes twinkling like wet pubes giving any indication of life behind those imposing beef-coloured walls.

What is it that keeps them together though, these two sentinels at the gates of good taste? What's the magic formula for their success as friends? Well, certainly not because they are two desperately repulsive characters right out of the bleakest pages of Beckett that no-one with any brain cells left whatsoever could possibly tolerate living with, as some stern critics have suggested. No, the simple fact is that, despite the frying pans in the face, the impossibly complicated arguments over who uses the toilet first in the morning, and all the other hundreds of millions of things that piss them off about each other, Eddie and Richie simply belong together. Like chalk and cheese, hamburgers and Chrissie Hynde, or Blair and Brown, there is simply a law of the universe that dictates that you cannot have one without the other.

Indeed, when you hear Richie say of his oldest and only friend, “I hope the bastard dies of anal fungus!” and Eddie smilingly replies, “Better that than die a lonely, fat, wanker of a virgin!” they could almost be brothers, such is the obvious esteem in which they still hold each other.

So it was with a song in my heart (the light, jolly refrains of 'Smack My Bitch Up', as I recall), a light skip to my step (I was late), and my purchased-specially-for-the-occasion, lead-lined, industrial-strength trousers safely fastened, that I set off to meet with the two heroes of our tale. It was the night before they left for this tour and they were still packing as I arrived. The door was hanging off its hinges so I walked in without knocking. Nobody bothered to say hello. Eddie was staring at the mirror on the wall, squeezing his spots, trying to “make them look redder,” he said. “There's no point having a good crop of chip-fat-and-lager spots if you're not going to make the most of them. If you've got it, flaunt it, that's what I say.”

Richie was on the floor with his head under the bed, his surprisingly round and invitingly girlish-looking posterior pointing north. He was “searching for my wank mags,” he announced in a muffled voice that made it appear as though he was talking out of his arse. “I can't go on tour without my wank mags, Eddie! Travelling from place to place, doing the show and then staying up all night drinking with the more deranged locals… I mean, it's not the sort of environment you're likely to meet any loose women in, is it?”

Just then, Eddie turned from the mirror to face me, as if noticing me for the first time.

“Richie,” he said, “who is this bald bloke with glasses who looks like a thug?”

“That's you, stupid!” said Richie's arse in that same muffled voice. “I've warned you before about staring into the mirror for too long. It sends you mad, remember? And you start talking to yourself and kissing yourself and taking your clothes off and …”

“No, I don't mean that. I mean, who's this funny-looking bloke that's just walked in and is just standing there saying nothing, just writing down everything we say?”

“Oh god! It's not the pigs again, is it?” cried Richie, hauling himself out from under the bed and looking at me peculiarly.

I hastened to reassure them. Here about the tour programme, I said. Just doing my job. Now if they'd just like to make themselves comfortable, I would whip out my portable machine and we could get going.

“Oh, goody,” said Richie, snickering. “It's not one of those massage machines, is it? The kind that gives you the body of an Adonis while you sit there picking your nose, digging for those really chunky bits that come out long and wet but soon go nice and hard after you've kneaded them with your fingers for half an hour, until they turn into the size and constituency of freshly picked peas, ready to eat! Mmm mmm! Like the young, guitar-wielding Tony Blair, only even hunkier, if you can imagine anything as scrumptious as that!”

“Actually, no,” I said. “I mean, a tape-recorder.”

He looked at me aghast. “So you are the police! I told you the last time you recorded me talking, I don't know anything about any weapons of masturbation! I was only joking when I threatened to light one of my farts and blow up the bus if it didn't divert to Wimbledon Common. I was late for signing-on, for god's sake! It was an emergency!”

“No, Rich,” said Eddie, always a calming influence on such occasions. “He means he's a journalist. A member of the Fourth Estate, and as such deserves to be treated with our utmost respect. Like this…”

He picked up an iron bar and hit me over the head with it. “That's for giving us Jordan!” he cried, then hit me again. “And that's for David Fucking Beckham!” He hit me again. “And his fucking book!” He hit me again. “Ruined The Sun, it did! The tit count was down forty per cent on the days they ran the bloody serialisation! I ended up trying to have a wank while thinking about Fergie kicking that boot into his face! Ridiculous! I couldn't even get a hard-on! If he'd aimed it a bit lower and taken his fucking eye out that might have been different…”

“I thought it was all right, actually,” grinned Richie. “If you didn't bother with the words and just looked at the pictures, I found it worked quite well. I mean, he's such a role model for the kids, isn't he? A loving husband and father, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and he still finds time to be an important leader of fashion…”

I was glad to hear Richie speak so fondly of one of his great heroes. Because that's when Eddie stopped hitting me -- and started hitting him instead.

“No, Eddie! No!” he screamed. “Can I help it if he looks so smart in the shining white armour of Real Madrid, a born Galactico from his impossibly stylish blonde coiffure to his carefully manicured, million-pound toenails? Well, can!?!”

Eddie redoubled his efforts before shoving Richie's head under the bed again and taking aim with his iron bar.

“Gentlemen,” I said, picking myself up off the floor. “Please, can we forget all this unpleasantness and just get down to business?”

“Oh, all right,” sighed Eddie, retrieving his bar from Richie's arse. “What do you want to know?”

Well, to start with, where were they born?

“In a pub,” grunted Eddie. “And I expect that's where I'll die, too. If I'm very lucky.”

“Mine was a home birth,” said Richie smugly. “The Home for Unwanted Products of Bizarre and Best Forgotten One Night Stands. It was very religious, full of nuns sashaying about in their gothic black uniforms and provocative, sexually ambiguous facial hair. I fell in love with one -- Sister Admonisher -- and she with me. Being a nun she would never allow me to fully consummate our love and I ended up holding a candle for her for years, even after I'd left school. Usually when the pubs had closed or if there was nothing on telly…”

Richie first met Eddie at school. Little Dick, as Richie was then and is still sometimes known, was assistant prefect. Eddie the Evil, as the trustees at the correction centre had playfully dubbed him, was honorary plimsoll minder. “Self-appointed,” he added proudly. “I was the Cloakroom Terminator. Anybody didn't put them away nicely when PE was over was dealt with very severely. First offenders would get their heads flushed down the toilets. Repeat offenders would their have entire bodies stuffed down there, duffle bags and all!”

Discovering a mutual interest in torturing as many of their classmates, teachers and school pets as possible (particularly hamsters, dangerous bastards that deserved special treatment, according to Richie) they became lifelong friends, scything their way through life's funny little foibles like two men with scythes in their hands, blindfolded, let loose in an abattoir. The subsequent laughs, screams, moans and more screams -- in fact, mainly screams -- have echoed down through the years.

So what's the secret of their success?

“Booze, chips, beer, lager and chips,” said Eddie.

“What success?” said Richie, modest and unassuming as ever.

I tried another tack. What was it they liked most about going on tour?

“Booze, chips, beer, lager and chips,” said Eddie.

“Just getting out there and meeting the people,” said Richie. “I love meeting new people, don't you, Eddie?“

“No. In fact, I have always hated meeting new people. It's something to do with existential angst, I think, and something to do with just hating students. I don't know which hurts me more.” continue reading